Jacob Goldstein (3:11)

And I know you well enough to know that if we are recording a podcast and there is a bottle of champagne, you want nothing more than to pop the cork on the mic. It's like I'm showing a banana to a monkey, and all you want to do in your monkey brain is peel the banana.

Robert Smith (3:28)

Open, open, open, open.

Jacob Goldstein (3:29)

I'm passing you the champagne, but I want to tell you three things about Veuve Clicot before you open it.

Robert Smith (3:34)

Okay, I'll prepare thing number one.

Jacob Goldstein (3:36)

And I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know this one until recently. Veuve Clicquot was a person. VAV means widow in French. Veuve Clicquot was the Widow Clicquot. She took over this basically failing winery when her husband died in 1805. And, Robert, you're just taking off the cage from the top of the bottle. I think there is a portrait of the Widow Clicquot on top of the little metal hat on the court.

Robert Smith (4:01)

Oh, yeah. Stern expression, curly hair.

Jacob Goldstein (4:03)

Thing number two. The Widow Clicquot made a technological breakthrough that helped turn champagne into the global phenomenon that it became. Became. The story of the Widow Cliqueau also includes a widow loophole, the Industrial Revolution, and Napoleon.

Robert Smith (4:23)

Oh, I love it.

Jacob Goldstein (4:24)

I'm Jacob Goldstein.

Robert Smith (4:25)

And I'm Robert Smith. And this is Business History, A show about the history of business.

Jacob Goldstein (4:34)

Nice.

Robert Smith (4:35)

I'm Prostitute. The fizz. The fizz is too much.

Jacob Goldstein (4:42)

You know, it's funny you should say that, because in the time of the Widow Clicquot, most of the wine that came out of the Champagne region of France did not have bubbles.

Robert Smith (4:52)

Huh.

Jacob Goldstein (4:53)

And there is a twist in our champagne story, and that is champagne as we know it arguably was not invented in champagne. It was not invented in France. It was invented in England. Yes.

Robert Smith (5:05)

Did they serve it warm like the beer?

Jacob Goldstein (5:08)

Don't know. Good question. And actually, let me say before we get into it, there was a key source, a really excellent source for the show today was a book called the Widow Cliquot. The author's name is Tilar Mazzeo. It's really fun, well written, interesting. And now, as they say, a major motion picture.

Robert Smith (5:26)

Really? Yeah. Okay.

Jacob Goldstein (5:28)

They always say major motion picture. They never say a movie.

Robert Smith (5:31)

Now a kinetoscope, a minor motion picture. They don't say that either.

Jacob Goldstein (5:34)

So we're going to start the story about 100 years before the widow Clicquot comes along, around 1700, with a monk, a Benedictine monk.

Robert Smith (5:46)

All great drinking stories start with a

Jacob Goldstein (5:47)

monk in the region of northeast France known as La Champagne. The wine is Le Champagne.

Robert Smith (5:55)

Oh, good to know.

Jacob Goldstein (5:56)

This monk's name was Dom Dom Perignon. No way. Yes. He was a guy. He was a guy and his monastery made wine. And for reasons no one understood at the time, sometimes bubbles would appear in their wine when they opened it, and delightfully, they didn't like it.

Robert Smith (6:21)

No, it's terrible. Who put the bubbles in my champagne?

Jacob Goldstein (6:24)

You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when, like, salsa or hummus has been in the fridge, too, and you taste it and it tastes just a little fizzy. There's just a little something on your tongue that tells you, don't eat this. And I think it was like a little fizz like that. It wasn't like, bubbly, like, bubbly today. And so one of the things Dom wanted to do was get the bubbles out of the wine. They actually called it Le Vin du Diable.

Robert Smith (6:49)

Oh, Devil's Wine.

Jacob Goldstein (6:49)

Devil's Wine. We understand today, actually why it happened, and it's interesting. So, you know, the way winemaking worked was they would take the. Essentially, the grape juice and they'd put it in wooden casks after the harvest. And the yeast, that occurred naturally on the grapes.

Robert Smith (7:06)

Wild yeast?

Jacob Goldstein (7:07)

Yes, wild yeast would consume the sugar from the grapes and it would excrete alcohol. Delicious. And carbon dioxide, which, in the regular wooden cask would just go off into the atmosphere and nobody even knew it was there. Right. They didn't know what carbon dioxide was. And so you'd wind up a few months later with just wine, regular still wine, which you would then put into either sealed casks or bottles. Right. You would seal it off. Now, the Champagne region is in the north of France, where it's cold. And interestingly, at the time Dom Perignon lived, around 1700, Europe was in the Little Ice Age. Remember the Little Ice Age, this period? Personally, I don't know, it was a hundred years or something, a long period when it was, like, actually cold and

Robert Smith (7:49)

crops were bad when it was cold

Jacob Goldstein (7:50)

and crops were bad. And so because it's cold and extra cold at this time, it slowed it down. It slowed fermentation down. Right. So what would happen is, at the end of the normal open cask fermentation process, not all of the sugars would have been metabolized by the yeast. So they'd seal it off, and now it's in a sealed container. Fermentation keeps happening. The yeast is metabolizing the sugar but there's nowhere for the carbon dioxide to go. So you open the cask and that has been sealed, or you open the bottle. Fizz bubbles.

Robert Smith (8:22)

I'm surprised it didn't blow up.

Jacob Goldstein (8:24)

Sometimes it did. Sometimes, in fact, it did. And so Dom is working on the bubbles problem, fails at that, but is in fact a genius winemaker, apparently. And later, later people will actually say Dom Perignon invented champagne. They'll in fact say that when he first tasted sparkling wine, he called out to another monk, come quickly, I am drinking the stars. This will be a lie when they say it'll be some marketing guy who makes it up. But it's a beautiful lie.

Robert Smith (8:53)

It is a beautiful lie.

Jacob Goldstein (8:54)

And in fact, the champagne company Moet and Chandon much later will register Dom Perignon's name as a trademark, make him famous. And it's why Dom Perignon is a fancy sparkling wine today, even though he thought it was the devil's wine. In fact, the birth of champagne as we know it does not come from Dom Perignon. It is. It comes delightfully from England, from France's arch rival, not known for its taste in. In anything foods and beverages. Ooh, tough enough. So the British imported wine in big wooden casks, and then they'd open the cask to drink the wine. But as you know, if you've opened a bottle of wine and you didn't finish it and you left it on the counter, never happened to me. It goes bad. It goes bad. So the British did a couple things to prevent their wine from going bad after they open the cask. One add sugars. Basically. It could be. Looks like kind of like a syrup, a fruity syrup.

Robert Smith (9:51)

It could be brandy, which speeds it up.

Jacob Goldstein (9:53)

It makes it taste better. Makes it taste better. And then after they added the sugar, they would reseal it, they would put it into a bottle and seal it. And business fact. Apparently the King of England had banned the use of wood for the fires to make glass because they needed the wood for ships. And so they used coal to make the bottles. And that made them stronger. So they had stronger because it bottles hotter in England. Yeah, I guess because it burns hotter. I guess because it burns hotter. I don't know, but that's what I think. So they had wine with extra sugar, put it in strong bottles, you open it and it's not a little fizzy like old hummus. It's bubbly. Like bubbly. And they tasted it and they thought delicious. They thought, the bubbles are fun. They thought, you can get in. It's nice for the odor. And rich people around Europe liked it. The regent who is running France, when was it? Louis XV was young. The Duke of Orleans, this is early 1700s. He gets a taste for champagne. He throws these crazy parties, orgies, basically, where champagne is key. The Russian czar starts to love it.

Robert Smith (11:02)

Is there some reason why it's for rich people or is this just the fad at the time?

Jacob Goldstein (11:06)

I think it's expensive to make. Right, because you have to make the wine and the strawberry wine, and then you kind of have to make it again.

Robert Smith (11:12)

Yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (11:12)

And it turns out to be quite complicated to make it again. You have to sort of get it from the first bottle into the second bottle. So. So it is labor intensive, and it's a rich people fad in champagne in the region, in France, they. They see this happening and they start trying to make it, but it's hard. As you alluded to before, for one thing, the bottles do tend to blow. Yes. Their glass is not as good as the glass in England. And so, like, half of the bottles blow up. The people who. Who go into the cellars to work with it apparently start wearing some kind of iron mask. I couldn't. I couldn't find a picture of it, but it was described as something like a modern catcher's mask, so that if a bottle explodes, the shards are less likely to hit him in the face. And there's this other problem that contributes to the cost, which is during that second fermentation, the. The schmutz, basically, the dead yeast, I guess, accumulates in the bottle. So it's cloudy. And they try and get the schmutz out, but that's expensive and slow. They'll pour it from one bottle into another. And so by the end of the 1700s, you know, now we're getting up to Barbe Nicole Clicquot, the hero of today's show. By the time she comes along, almost all of the wine made in the Champagne region is still normal still wine.

Robert Smith (12:30)

Because it's easier.

Jacob Goldstein (12:30)

It's easier. It's what they know how to do. It's typically red, and frankly, it's not as good as the wine in Bordeaux. And everybody kind of knows it. Although in Champagne, they're kind of in denial. And Barbe Nicole Clicquot is gonna be one of the key people who changes that, who turns champagne into this global, enduring phenomenon. We were talking about this story and it came up like, who is she? What was she like?

Robert Smith (12:58)

Yeah, was she like a inventing genius?

Jacob Goldstein (13:00)

Was she a marketer figure out in Part A. Cause it's a long time ago. It's the early 1800s. She didn't write an autobiography like Henry Ford. She wasn't a celebrity like Thomas Edison. And so what we know about her comes largely from her business correspondent. She has these people working for her around the continent, and there's these letters. And it seems from those, it's. You know, if I were gonna make an inference from what I've read of those, which, to be clear, largely comes from this book, the Widow Cliquot. I feel like she was not, like, a champagne lover who happened to run a business. I feel like she was a killer entrepreneur. And the thing she sold happened to be champagne. So here is her life, right? She's born Barbe Nicole Ponsardin, a daughter of a rich wool Merchant. And in 1798, when she's 20 years old, she enters into an arranged marriage with the son of another rich wool merchant.

Robert Smith (13:56)

So many offspring.

Jacob Goldstein (13:58)

I mean, it does remind me of the way the royal families of Europe would all intermarry as, like, alliances. I mean, this seems like that, but M and A. Right. This is like a merger. In the 1800s, you do it through marriage. This is, you know, right after the French Revolution. And so they actually. They have a Catholic wedding ceremony, but they have to do it in secret because I guess the Catholic Church is banned at this point. Like, the Revolution was super intense. Yeah.

Robert Smith (14:24)

It really got into people's lives. It wasn't just a political change of power. They were going to have a new era and a new way of living.

Jacob Goldstein (14:30)

Yeah. The year zero. Right. And then they, you know, have their civil wedding license as citizen. Citizen Pontardin and Citizen Clicquote. And one thing about the Clicquot family is, besides being mainly in the textile business, they had a sideline as wine merchants, as sellers of wine. And around the time Barbe Nicole marries Francois Clicquot, Francois decides he's gonna really focus on wine.

Robert Smith (14:57)

To this day, if you are rich and successful in something like wool, you're

Jacob Goldstein (15:01)

like, you know what?

Robert Smith (15:02)

I'm gonna buy a vineyard and I'm gonna make wine.

Jacob Goldstein (15:05)

And my playboy son can screw around in the wine business. I don't know if Francois was a playboy, but he tries to make wine his thing. He travels around Europe trying to make new sales, and he is not that successful, at least not initially. But it is a really interesting time in the wine business. The wine industry, such as it, is in France because of Napoleon, actually. So Napoleon is running France by this point, getting into the early 1800s. And one thing I've learned from our show. And you talked about this in the jars show, right. Like, Napoleon was kind of this industrialization figure.

Robert Smith (15:44)

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's often said he did this because he wanted to take over Europe, and you need industry to support your army. But what you rarely see from a general is somebody who actually is like, well, I'm gonna solve the problems of business. I'm going to industrialize this country. In the case of the Cannes, he did it by offering a prize if you could come up with a way to store food in jars.

Jacob Goldstein (16:08)

And so similarly with wine, he had this guy who I think he had some, like, position, head of the interior or something, but he was. This guy was bringing a kind of more scientific mindset to wine. And so Napoleon, in the early 1800s, commissions a book that is called the Art of Making, Controlling and Perfecting Wines. And the book sets out to turn winemaking from this sort of quasi mystical thing. Remember, there was a monk, was like, the famous wine guy. Right. And the wine of the devil to turn it from that into this more scientific process, like this much sugar, this much time. It is a very enlightenment vibe. So around the time this book comes out, Francois decides, okay, you know, we're in the wine distributing business, but winemaking is becoming a science. I'm going to learn the science, and I'm going to vertically integrate. Surely he would not have said vertically integrate. He wouldn't even have said it in French. I'm sure nobody said it.

Robert Smith (17:08)

He's like, I don't want to pay people for the crepes and the bottles.

Jacob Goldstein (17:10)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Francois decides to get into winemaking. And it. It's not great. It's not killing as a business, in part because the Nepal. I'm going to stop drinking wine now. In part. In part, it's not his fault because the Napoleonic wars keep starting and stop, you know, kind of tough for business, especially if you're in an export business. And Francois does make one great move that is going to pay off throughout this story, and that is hiring a traveling salesman named Louis Bohm.

Robert Smith (17:42)

Bohm.

Jacob Goldstein (17:43)

B O H M e. I'm going with Bohm.

Robert Smith (17:45)

Yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (17:46)

Who travels all over Europe. He has great connections in, like, Prussia and Russia, and he is making some sales. Rich people do still like to drink bubbly wine. And then in 1805, Francois Clicquot dies. He dies because what? Because it's 1805 and people die all the time.

Robert Smith (18:06)

And he's young yeah, he's youngish.

Jacob Goldstein (18:08)

Yeah. They've gotten married a few years before. It's probably typhoid is the guess. Francois father is despondent, of course, and decides he's going to sell off the wine business. But Barb Nicole suggests something else. She says, what if I take over the wine business? What if I run it? And this is really interesting in a broader historical way. It fits into this kind of complicated historical dynamic of the role of women in business more broadly around this time. If you go back a little early, go back to the 1700s, it was actually relatively common for women to be in business. You know, it's the pre industrial world.

Robert Smith (18:53)

Yeah. And they were making textiles and clothing at home. But that was work, right? That was work for families.

Jacob Goldstein (18:58)

Factories were not a thing yet. They hadn't come along. And this separation of work and business wasn't such a thing in the pre industrial world. You farmed with your family, you, as you say, you know, cottage industry, they called it. It was literal cottages. People in their homes did it. So now by the 1800s, the world's starting to industrialize, modernize, and there is this idea of home and work as separate spheres that is emerging. And home is the sphere for women and work is the sphere for men. And in fact, just before Francois dies, this is codified in France in the Napoleonic Code, it's put into law. And in this law, women are essentially excluded from the business world. They can't work without their special permission from their husband. They can't own property without special permission from their husband.

Robert Smith (19:56)

And in fact, this is why a lot of the shows we do feature almost exclusively men. Like, to this day, through the great age of business, women were at home and men were running the business.

Jacob Goldstein (20:06)

Yes. And in France, in many ways, it was illegal for women to work, but. But there was this exception, almost a loophole for widows. For widows. Widows, unlike women who were married or who had never been married, could be out there in the business world. Under the Napoleonic Code, they could own property, they could run businesses without the consent of a man. So, Barbe Nicole Clicquot, who is now Veuve Clicquot, now the widow Clicquot decides, that's what I'm gonna do. I'm a widow. I'm gonna run the family business.

Robert Smith (20:49)

I gotta pour a little bit more champagne while we take a break. Give me a clink.

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Robert Smith (25:37)

We're back from the break and we are going to start the business. Adventures of Veuve Clicquot the Widow Cliquot.

Jacob Goldstein (25:45)

So because of the way the Clicquot wine business is structured, the widow Clicot has to get the buy in of her father in law. And he does agree on one condition. He says, okay, you can do it, but you have to basically serve an apprenticeship. You have to run the business for four years with someone who knows the wine business well. And after that, if you want to go solo, you can. And she agrees, Barb. Nicole Clicquot agrees to this. And the partner is yet another textile merchant turned winemaker, a guy named Alexandre Fourneau.

Robert Smith (26:27)

It's kind of an arranged corporate marriage at this point.

Jacob Goldstein (26:29)

Yeah, yeah, it's purely platonic, just business. And so in 1806, Clicquot and Fourneau enter into a four year partnership. And they call their wine business Veuve Clicquot Fourneau, Widow Cliquot Fourneau. And pretty quickly, they do get a bunch of big orders from Prussia and Russia. They got that good salesman up there. But France is at war with England again. The British are blockading French ports again. And so now Veuve Clicquot Fourneau has wine, bubbly wine. They have the orders for the wine, but they have no way of getting the wine to the customers.

Robert Smith (27:13)

Who are ordering the wine supply chain. Logistics.

Jacob Goldstein (27:17)

Yes, yes, they have a logistics problem. And so Clicquot and Fourneau decide they're going to try and go around the British blockade.

Robert Smith (27:27)

Run the blockade.

Jacob Goldstein (27:28)

Well, so people did run the blockade. You know, they just would send ships out. They're going to do something a little different. They're going to take the wine overland to Amsterdam and go from there. Because when they make this decision, it's just the French ports getting blockaded and Fourneau actually goes along with the wine overland to Amsterdam. But around this time, Napoleon has made his brother the King of Holland and it's become a sort of, I guess, a vassal state. And so just as the wine is about to get shipped out to the Baltic, the British show up and blockade Amsterdam.

Robert Smith (28:08)

They're never going to get over the fact that they invented champagne and now it's taking off without them.

Jacob Goldstein (28:13)

Furneaux writes back to Clicquot Sea commerce is totally ruined and therefore all commerce on the continent.

Robert Smith (28:21)

It's the only thing they had.

Jacob Goldstein (28:22)

They put the wine into storage in Amsterdam, but it's not cold storage. There is no cold storage. And they send a salesman there to try and liquidate the wine, if you will. But the wine basically goes bad by the time he gets there. It's. It's a loss. And meanwhile war is spreading and that demand that they had before is collapsing. Their salesman in Prussia writes to Clicquot about the situation in Prussia. Give. Give it a read. It's here in the script. What he writes.

Robert Smith (28:54)

Prussia has lacked even money for the worst vintage this past year. And after 15 years of war and has given up on being able to procure our luxury drink. All is war. War and war poet.

Jacob Goldstein (29:08)

It's a lot of war. War is bad for the champagne business.

Robert Smith (29:12)

I know victory is great for the champagne business, but the act of war, terrible.

Jacob Goldstein (29:16)

They're trying to sell more wine domestically in France, but by 1810 things are still quite grim. And that their salesman, Louis Boehm, writes another letter to give the latest sales update. And you can sum it up in three words from that letter. Robert.

Robert Smith (29:32)

Business totally dead.

Jacob Goldstein (29:36)

So now the four year partnership, Clicquot Fourneau comes to its end. And unsurprisingly, Fourneau decides he wants out. But Barbe Nicole wants to stay in. She drops Fourneau's name from the business and Veuve Clicquot Fourneau becomes Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. She adds her maiden name, which is still the Full name today of the winery. So that's 1810. And the next year, in 1811, there is a portent.

Robert Smith (30:06)

A portent in the sky.

Jacob Goldstein (30:08)

A literal portent in the sky. A comet. A big, beautiful comet.

Robert Smith (30:12)

Famous comet.

Jacob Goldstein (30:13)

Yeah. And apparently for champagne, it portended an incredible harvest.

Robert Smith (30:19)

Sure. There's a connection.

Jacob Goldstein (30:21)

Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it was the sunspots. Big, beautiful grapes. Sugary, just perfect. Amazing harvest. Veuve Clicquot. Start burning a star, a shooting star, a comet logo into their corks to mark the year. In fact, actually, interestingly, at the time, wine bottles didn't typically have labels. They weren't branded with labels, so there was like a literal brand. Right. They would burn into the cork an image Vovclicot usually used, an anchor, which they still use, was a sign of good luck, I guess. Doesn't feel like good luck. So they have this comet vintage wine, and there is this interesting question, right? Incredible harvest. Is that good news if you're running a winery?

Robert Smith (31:06)

Well, you may have an incredible harvest, but it means that everyone else did also. And as we know, in the commodities business, if everyone is having a bumper harvest of grapes, if everyone's making wine, everyone's making champagne, then the price is going to go down. It's actually going to be a supply

Jacob Goldstein (31:24)

overload, a glut of delicious wine.

Robert Smith (31:27)

They're drinking it as fast as they can, but they can't sell it or the prices are falling. Yeah.

Jacob Goldstein (31:32)

And so the widow Cliqu decides she's not going to sell at that moment. She's going to keep that delicious 1811 Comet vintage in the cellar, which means, for the short term, she has a cash crunch. She is wine rich and cash poor. And so she's telling her salesmen, you know, sell the older vintages, get whatever price you can for it, just so we can get some money coming in. And as this is happening, Napoleon invades Russia. Come on.

Robert Smith (32:05)

You know, I have to say, I know we don't have a lot of information about her, but the widow Kliko, I think, is coming off as a little bit of a business genius. The marketing of the widow part, the comet on the cork, and knowing enough to store the wine, that this will be valuable in the future, I don't know. I think this is pretty shrewd.

Jacob Goldstein (32:25)

It's gonna work out in the end. Spoiler alert.

Robert Smith (32:28)

Cheers to that.

Jacob Goldstein (32:29)

So Napoleon invades Russia, which, as we know, is gonna be bad for Napoleon. And in the short run, it is also gonna be bad for Voivklikot, because

Robert Smith (32:38)

the Russians love her champagne.

Jacob Goldstein (32:39)

And the Czar now bans importation of bottled wine from France, which is basically banning the importation of champagne. So sales are down and down and down. Barbe Nicole Clicquot fires all of her salesmen except Louis Bum, the super salesman, but even he isn't selling much. And by the end of 1813, sales are down 80% from where they were when Francois Cliquot died in 1805.

Robert Smith (33:10)

This is where it's helpful to come from a rich family.

Jacob Goldstein (33:12)

It's true. It is true. And things are about to get even worse because now the Russians are invading France.

Robert Smith (33:21)

Oh, I forgot about this one.

Jacob Goldstein (33:23)

Forgets about the counter.

Robert Smith (33:24)

We talk about Napoleon failing to take Russia, but we forget that the Russians

Jacob Goldstein (33:30)

came back at him. Yeah. So in the winter of 1814, the Russian army gets to champagne. In fact, it's the Russians and the Prussians. It is all of the usans coming into champagne. And you know, they all hate Napoleon. Veuve Clicquot is low on cash. They still have this comet champagne from 1811.

Robert Smith (33:53)

And you hear that the Russians are coming, bad news. You're like, they're going to drink all my champagne.

Jacob Goldstein (33:58)

So she says, the widow says to her employees, wall up the cellars, build a wall in the cellar so that they can't get to our 1811 champagne. The Russians and the Prussians show up, and you know what? They're not that bad. As far as an invading army goes, they don't loot so much, they actually buy. They buy champagne from the widow, although she holds back that comet vintage. And then the French counterattack, or I guess counter, counter attacked at this point. And there is a story, it's probably not true. The widow Clicquot gave bottles of champagne to French soldiers on horseback who were coming through town. And they used their sabers to slice the cork off of the bottle and drink it that way. And this is the moment when this technique called sabrage was invented. Probably not true.

Robert Smith (34:48)

Which is done to this day at super fancy places. You know, I grew up in Park City, Utah, and there are some fancy resorts, and every time the sun goes down, they pull out a sword and open up a bottle of champagne. It might even be cool.

Jacob Goldstein (35:01)

I feel like that's a thing you might know how to do. Do you know how to do it?

Robert Smith (35:04)

I do not know how to do it.

Jacob Goldstein (35:06)

So the Russians come back through town now, counter, counter, counter attack. They take Paris. And In April of 1814, Napoleon abdicates the throne. Able was he there? He saw Elba and the Russians are back in champagne drinking to celebrate their victory, remembering how much they love champagne and the widow Clicquot writes this letter celebrating the peace and I want you to read a decent chunk of it because it is the most Entrepreneur celebrates Peace letter I have ever read.

Robert Smith (35:39)

At last, she says, the time has come when, after the sufferings our town has known, we may breathe freely and hope for a general and permanent peace and consequently for commercial activity which is stagnating for too long. Thank God I have been spared, my properties and sellers are intact. Hint hint. And I'm ready to resume business with all the activity that recent changes will allow. Cheers to her.

Jacob Goldstein (36:04)

VAV Clicot is back baby.

Robert Smith (36:06)

After the break.

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Robert Smith (39:40)

We have returned.

Jacob Goldstein (39:41)

Barbe Nicole Klikoul knows that the Russians have been in town pounding her champagne. Obviously they clearly love her champagne. She also knows that there is all this pent up demand in Russia for her champagne.

Robert Smith (39:57)

Russians always love an elite product, you gotta say.

Jacob Goldstein (40:00)

But VOV Clicot is not the only champagne in champagne. Her arch rival, Jean Remy Moet, no, of Moet and Chandon fame, is also eager to get back to selling to the Russians that guy. And the widow Cliquot wants to beat him there. She wants to be the first champagne in town. And so as soon as Napoleon abdicates, even before the peace is finalized, before the British have lifted the embargo, Barbe Nicole Clicquot starts scheming with her star salesman Louis Bohm to get her champagne on a ship to the Baltic. They want to sell that 1811 wine, the Comet vintage that they've been holding

Robert Smith (40:41)

back to the Russians, who to be clear, are celebrating. This is the perfect audience for champagne.

Jacob Goldstein (40:48)

So Boehm finds a Dutch ship that's about to leave from France and they load up 10,550 bottles of champagne, send it by wagon to the ship and amazingly, the British embargo is lifted just before the ship sails. But France at this point required this special export license if you wanted to ship champagne out. And the widow Clicquot did not have this export license and she's in a hurry. She wants to beat Moet. So rather than waiting for the paperwork to come through, she decides to send the wine out without a license. She is basically gonna smuggle 10,000 bottles of wine out of France.

Robert Smith (41:33)

Screw it. We're gonna do it live.

Jacob Goldstein (41:35)

We're doing it live. And if we get caught, you know, this huge chunk of our assets could be seized by the French government. So Louis Bum gets onto the ship with the wine, says he sleeps next to the ship. Is that true? I don't know. Apparently, the widow sent him with a copy of Don Quixote. So they're definitely having fun with this at some level. And Louis and the wine make it out of France without getting stopped. They make it up to the Baltic, and they land at Konigsberg. Today is known as Kaliningrad, which is this weird Russian exclave in the Baltics. I feel like it's a place you might have gone on vacation.

Robert Smith (42:14)

I have been close to it. It is a part of Russia that is not connected to Russia and is on the Baltic Sea, and it's right next to Lithuania.

Jacob Goldstein (42:22)

So weird.

Robert Smith (42:23)

So weird.

Jacob Goldstein (42:24)

So that's where they land. We know what happened when they land because Louis wrote Barbe Nicole a letter telling her sort of the story of what happens when they get there. And so he tells her the first thing he did was he checked to see if the wine had handled the trip okay. Right. Again, there's not refrigeration. It might have gone bad. So he opens a bottle of wine to taste it, and he writes to her that the wine was as yellow as gold and as sweet as nectar. Mm.

Robert Smith (42:51)

True to this day. That's great.

Jacob Goldstein (42:53)

And then he got off the ship. And immediately it was clear they had beaten Moet here. Read the line that he wrote to her.

Robert Smith (43:04)

Our ship is the first in many years to travel to the north filled with the wine of the champagne.

Jacob Goldstein (43:10)

So he's unloading the ship with this delicious champagne that they haven't had there in years. And even before he gets off the dock, the local wine merchants are basically fighting each other to buy from him. Demand is through the roof. He's a great salesman. What does he do?

Robert Smith (43:24)

He raises the price. There's no price tag on it.

Jacob Goldstein (43:27)

They haven't invented price tags yet.

Robert Smith (43:29)

Anything, he says. And the number, he says is high.

Jacob Goldstein (43:32)

It's high. He sells enough of the wine right there to cover the cost of the trip to give him a little margin. But most of the wine he holds back to send to their agent. Agent in Russia.

Robert Smith (43:42)

Give him a little taste, charge them more.

Jacob Goldstein (43:45)

The wine gets to Russia, and the Russians go wild for the comet vintage. VAV Clicquot. The King of Prussia is drinking it, the Czar is drinking it. And apparently, as. As Louis writes back to Barbe Nicole, everybody is getting wasted on Valve Clicquot.

Robert Smith (44:03)

In his letter, he says, of all the fine wines that have teased Northern heads, none compare to Madame Clicquot's 1811 cuvee. Delicious to taste, it is an assassin. And anyone who wants to make its acquaintance will become well attached to his chair, because after paying his respects to a bottle, he will go looking for crumbs under the tables.

Jacob Goldstein (44:27)

Everybody is drinking themselves under the table.

Robert Smith (44:30)

I'm very close. I'm very close.

Jacob Goldstein (44:32)

And I didn't find record of what he was charging, but clearly it was a lot, because at some point Barbe Nicole writes to him and she is clearly very interested in the prices he is charging for this wine.

Robert Smith (44:48)

And she writes back, great God, what a price. How novel. I'm over the top with joy and satisfaction. What overwhelming happiness. This change will pay out. The heavens have showered me with blessings after all the terrible moments I've passed. Ah. It's it. Victory.

Jacob Goldstein (45:04)

She did it. She did it. She beat Moet and her other competitors to Russia and Prussia. And really, she has made a name for her brand there. Her own name. Veuve Clicquot is a brand that is going to live for centuries. And she has one more big move to make. It's not sales, it's not marketing. It is actually a technological innovation. And it is, in the wine world, I think, the thing she is most famous for to this day, it's a way to make champagne that's more efficient, that leads to better wine. And it goes back to a fundamental challenge in making champagne. Remember that thing that happens? You do the second fermentation in the bottle and the yeast dies and it's schmutzy. It's nasty. Yeah. And so the way they dealt with that at the time was they would actually take that bottle, open it and pour it into a new bottle slowly, so that the schmutz would stay in the old bottle and then they'd put a cork in it.

Robert Smith (46:03)

Takes forever.

Jacob Goldstein (46:04)

Takes forever. You spill some wine, it gets less bubbly. They called it Transvaj, which I believe is French for super labor intensive and inefficient. And you lose a bunch of wine. Yes. And so everybody's trying to make this process work better, including Barbe Nicole Clicquot. So she works with her cellar master to try and figure out what to do. And they have this idea, they bring her dining table down into the cellar and they drill holes in it at a little bit of an angle. And then they put the champagne bottles in upside down.

Robert Smith (46:43)

The neck fits into the table.

Jacob Goldstein (46:45)

The neck fits into the table. They call it surpointe, which means en pointe. Like a ballerina up on pointe shoes. That's what the bottle is. French. The bottle is en pointe. Very French. And so workers, every day, they come in, the bottle's upside down, and they just give it a little twist. A little twist, which I guess dislodges the schmutz from the side and makes it settle in the neck right next to the cork. And then after some amount of time, I guess like weeks or maybe months, you can do this thing where you dislodge the cork real quick. The schmutz shoots out, you put a little more wine in to top it off, and then you put in a new cork.

Robert Smith (47:19)

Huh. Huh.

Jacob Goldstein (47:20)

Doesn't sound that efficient to me, frankly. Like, it still sounds quite labor intensive. But I was thinking about this. You know, we tell stories about the big breakthroughs, these wild aha moments. But in fact, most technological improvements are like this. They are these new ideas that are an incremental gain that lets you have wine that is more bubbly with less loss and less labor, even though it still seems like a lot of work. And over centuries in lots of different fields, these kind of incremental improvements lead to tremendous gains. And so that is what's happening here. And actually, for many years, Valve Cliqueaux keeps this breakthrough a trade secret. Moet is like, we gotta figure it out.

Robert Smith (48:01)

How are they doing it?

Jacob Goldstein (48:02)

Eventually, everybody figures it out and starts making wine this way. They go from tables to these like, kind of easels. I think they call them desks, but. But it's the basic idea of this. Put it upside down and give it a little twist. For decades after this breakthrough, the widow Clicquot keeps running her business. The wine business keeps growing, although there were some bad moves, notably the moment when she got tired of paying banks to borrow money. You know, it's a very capital intensive business. You always borrowing money.

Robert Smith (48:32)

So she decides you don't sell the wine until months later, or years even.

Jacob Goldstein (48:35)

Yeah. And so she decides she's going to start her own bank. More vertical integration doesn't work. She gets out, it's fine. It doesn't take her down. The champagne business keeps growing. And by the time she retired in 1841, Veuve Clicquot was selling hundreds of thousands of bottles of champagne all around the world. In London, when people ordered champagne a bottle of champagne at a bar. Sometimes they'd just say, give me a bottle of the Widow. And she lived for decades after that. She lived to be quite old, well into her 80s. And, you know, she spent a lot of time with her family. They were one of the richest families in France.

Robert Smith (49:13)

Did she remarry?

Jacob Goldstein (49:14)

She did not. She remained the Widow Clicquot. And at some level, I think even though she officially retired and other people were running the business, at some level, she never stopped working. There was this guy who visited her late in her life and who said she was someone whose soul was in business. Scanning over each day to her last, the ledger of the commercial house to which she had given her name.

Robert Smith (49:45)

All right, past the widow with that one. I'm gonna have a little bit more. Cheers to her. Best day of work ever.

Jacob Goldstein (49:53)

Thanks very much to our listener, Annette Wellkamp, who wrote to us and pointed out very fairly that we had not yet had any women as central characters on the show and who very helpfully suggested that we do a show about the Widow Clicquot. So, thank you.

Robert Smith (50:08)

Amazing story, Amazing story. Thank you so much. And so if you're a listener and you think we have ignored big areas of business history, let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Jacob Goldstein (50:18)

You can write to us at BusinessHistoryUshkin FM or you can find me on Twitter @JacobGoldstein. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Robert Smith (50:25)

I'm RadioSmith. Wherever you want to find me.

Jacob Goldstein (50:28)

Today's show was produced by Gabriel Hunter Chang. It was run and edited by Ryan Dilley and engineered by Sarah Bruguerre. Our show is on YouTube. Our video editor is Matt Nielsen.

Robert Smith (50:39)

You can watch how much of the bottle I drank?

Jacob Goldstein (50:41)

A non trivial amount. I'm Jacob Goldstein.

Robert Smith (50:47)

I'm Robert Smith. Thanks for listening.

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